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Tuesday, January 06, 2015

The US supported torture hasn’t stopped

Ever since the CIA report on the use of torture was released,
last year, many Americans as myself have demanded action to end these human
rights abuses. Yet many of our legislators have shown their true colors
defending the use of torture and the CIA.

From Kansas our own Congressman Mike Pompeo, who serves on the
House Intelligence Committee, has told KNSS News that releasing the information was
"inappropriate" and “folks could get killed." Pompea has been a
big supporter of government secrecy, spying on citizens and the use of torture
to get what our government wants.

According to The World Can’t Wait Dick Cheney said “I'd do it
again in a minute,” on “Meet the Press” December 14. Cheney has been repeating
his basic message that the US has to be ready to go to the “dark side” using,
“basically, any means necessary to achieve our objectives.”

The WCW also cited Senator Lindsey Graham, who has never met
a piece of repressive legislation he couldn't get behind, who said “We have a
lot going for us that our enemy doesn’t. We’re actually good people, and
they’re bastards,” as an explanation of why he supports everything that was
done post-9/11.-សតិវ​អតុ

Here is some other information I received from The World Can’t Wait:

One of the presistent fallacies about the US torture camp at Guantanamo Bay in
Cuba, is that it was a “mistake” of the Bush Regime, a misguided attempt to
“keep America safe.” You hear this from Democrat apologists, who for the last
six full years, have been in position to close it.

But listen to those who control Congress now, and those who passed the Military
Commissions Act in 2006. That orgy of the complete abrogation of rights for
people the US identified as enemies in the so-called “global war on terror” was
vengeance against any group of people who challenged American supremacy.

Their goal was to have a place where
they could openly defy international norms. They crow about it, still, and
do not intend to give it up.....

....So this is what the “good” people did:
“The CIA torturers took sadistic and ghoulish delight in inflicting sexually
degrading torture on captives. Detainees were frequently stripped naked and
forced to urinate and defecate on themselves. The report describes ‘rectal
feeding’—forcing material up the rectums of detainees, a form of rape.

Detainees were subjected to constant and viciously realistic death threats.
They were placed in tubs of ice for extended times. One detainee was chained
partially nude to a concrete floor and died of hypothermia. Prisoners were
subjected to sleep deprivation for up to a week, driven to ‘hallucinations,
paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm and self-mutilation.’”

We also learned from the Senate's report on torture last month that, though
publicly and privately there is intense struggle over letting out the truth
about Guantanamo, the black sites, rendition, and torture under Bush, the
Democatic leadership in Congress was fully briefed at the time, and kept quiet.

Those in authority who people expected
to act to stop these outrages have not done so. Does that mean we leave it
alone? NO, it does not. Protest over the next week should bring out people who are
determined to stop these depraved crimes.

The torture report — redacted as it was — has inspired renewed focus on the
crimes of the Bush Regime. Democracy Now! reported last month:

“The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights has accused former
Bush administration officials, including CIA
Director George Tenet and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, of war crimes, and
called for an immediate investigation by a German prosecutor. The move follows
the release of a Senate report on CIA
torture which includes the case of a German citizen, Khalid El-Masri, who was
captured by CIA agents in 2004 due to
mistaken identity and tortured at a secret prison in Afghanistan.”

Torture lawyer John Yoo, defender of almost every single reactionary US position, was given an
endowed chair at UC Berkeley Boalt Hall Law School in 2014.

Right now, there are renewed discussions on how to get him disbarred and
investigated. Martin Garbus, the distinguished First Amendment attorney, wrote that the memos written by Yoo and Jay Bybee in 2002
providing legal justification for torture were “not used to interpret the law —
they were intentionally written to disregard the law.”

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The cost of maintaining US Imperialism is high!

No other country in the world puts as much of its budget into the military as the US. This country is the top imperialist power in the world today and that is costing us a lot of resources that are badly needed elsewhere.